Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump’s Capitulation to Erdogan Is Complete

The ‘cease-fire’ between the U.S. and Turkey probably won’t hold and definitely won’t make Syria more stable.

October 17, 2019 at 10:30 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

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The strange thing about the “cease-fire” negotiated Thursday in Ankara between the U.S. and Turkey is that one party isn’t actually fighting and the other seems unlikely to abide by it.

Turkey’s foreign minister said the agreement “is not a ceasefire” but rather a pause in military operations. He vowed that those operations would continue until Kurdish fighters — aligned with the U.S. until earlier this month — leave the border area entirely. For good measure, he also contradicted Vice President Mike Pence, saying his government never promised not to send its army into the city of Kobani.